De Blasio leaves a lobbyist-meeting disclosure pledge unfulfilled

Mayor Bill de Blasio announced earlier this month that he had sharply curtailed his meeting with lobbyists until the multiple investigations involving him and his administration have concluded, but that doesn’t mean the business of lobbying is grinding to a halt at City Hall.

While de Blasio has proactively published on the city's website a list of the meetings he has had with lobbyists since he took office in January 2014, he has never followed through on a campaign pledge he made in 2013 to disclose meetings between lobbyists and the rest of his administration — the deputy mayors, dozens of commissioners and senior policy advisers who craft and shape city policy.

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A de Blasio spokeswoman told POLITICO New York in March that the mayor still believed in his 2013 pledge to require “city officials in executive agencies [to] publicly disclose meetings with registered lobbyists on a monthly basis,” but that there was no timeline for the pledge to be fulfilled.

"The Mayor’s position is that lobbyist meetings with officials at city agencies should be reported," former de Blasio spokeswoman Karen Hinton told POLITICO New York at the time. "The administration is discussing changes to require lobbyists to report meetings with city officials, in addition to other ways to improve reporting, such as encouraging more frequent reporting and more details about subject matter."

Six months later, little progress has been made, the mayor admits.

Asked at an unrelated press conference earlier this week about a timeline for fulfilling his pledge, the mayor replied: “I have to check on that.”

“As you know, we take all of our pledges from the platform very seriously. I was just looking earlier at an update on how many of them are moving, and it’s the overwhelming majority," he said. "Some pieces are still being put together, so I will come back with a timeline for you on that."

"We are voluntarily disclosing when the mayor has been lobbied and we are working to expand that to include agency leaders and deputy mayors," de Blasio spokesman Eric Phillips said. "Constructing that process doesn't happen overnight and we are proud of the progress we've made. We'll satisfy the pledge."

Meetings with officials at various city agencies represented the biggest portion of the city's $86 million in lobbying expenditures last year, according to an annual lobbying report published by the City Clerk’s office.

Just 7 percent of lobbying in 2015 was directed toward the Office of the Mayor, while the most — 32 percent — was directed at city agencies, according to the report.

The volume of lobbying has expanded rapidly since de Blasio took office, increasing 37 percent over the past two years, from $62.7 million in 2013 to a record-breaking $86 million in 2015. The number of clients lobbying City Hall has grown by 32 percent between 2013 and 2015, from 1,291 clients to 1,705 last year.

A recent Freedom of Information Law request by POLITICO New York and other news outlets for correspondence between employees of the city’s highest-earning lobbying firm, James Capalino and Associates, and city government officials turned up roughly 5,800 pages of emails exchanged over a 16-month period. Only a handful were sent directly by the mayor.

During the period covered by the FOIL request — January 2014 through April 2015 — Capalino’s lobbyists corresponded with 139 different city government employees, including each of the deputy mayors in office at that time — First Deputy Mayor Tony Shorris, Deputy Mayor for Housing and Economic Development Alicia Glen, Deputy Mayor for Strategic Policy Initiatives Richard Buery and former Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services Lilliam Barrios-Paoli.

The emails evince an often informal, warm relationship between Capalino’s firm and the administration. There are missives that are written in shorthand and include occasional emojis, requests by lobbyists for administration officials’ personal cell phone numbers and congratulatory notes about personal news, birthdays and vacations. Dinners and lunches were also planned.

Capalino and his firm’s lobbyists also corresponded directly with commissioners and department heads, including Dan Zarilli, the mayor’s senior director of climate policy and programs who also oversees the Mayor’s Office of Recovery and Resiliency, the Mayor’s Office of Sustainability and the City’s OneNYC program; sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia; Taxi and Limousine commissioner Meera Joshi; Department of Veterans' Services commissioner Loree Sutton; former Office to Combat Domestic Violence commissioner Rose Pierre-Louis; Community Affairs Unit commissioner Marco Carrion; Office of Intergovernmental Affairs director Emma Wolfe; and Gabrielle Fialkoff, head of the Mayor's Office of Strategic Partnerships; and Darren Bloch, director of the Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York City.

In a statement, a Capalino spokesperson said, "As would be expected from the largest government relations practice in New York City, we routinely communicate with City Hall and officials across city agencies on behalf of our clients."

Phillips told POLITICO New York earlier this month that while “the mayor’s made an ethical decision for himself,” about meeting with lobbyists, other administration officials aren’t bound to distance themselves in the same way.

“Each and every city employee makes ethical judgments every day in a wide variety of interactions with the lobbying industry. That won’t change,” Phillips said.

Without the disclosure of meetings department heads and city commissioners have had with lobbyists, there is little information available to the public about when and why they are happening. Department heads and commissioners don’t publish as many daily public schedules as the mayor does, for understandable reasons. Still, getting those schedules, which are required to be disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act, is difficult.

A POLITICO New York FOIL request filed nearly two years ago seeking the daily schedules of each of the deputy mayors and senior de Blasio administration officials has been only partially fulfilled. City Hall has released the schedules of Deputy Mayor Richard Buery and Deputy Mayor Alicia Glen. Significant portions of Glen’s calendar were redacted.

The unfulfilled pledge forms a contrast between the mayor’s administration, which de Blasio promised would be the “most transparent” in the city’s history, and that of Gov. Andrew Cuomo. The Democratic governor, who promised his would be the “most transparent” administration in the state’s history, has frequently been criticized for his secrecy in all facets of state government. But on this subject, his administration has for years readily shared more information than the city.

Since 2011, meetings between department heads and commissioners have been proactively disclosed as part of the “Project Sunlight” reforms Cuomo implemented when he was state attorney general.